Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Cultural Politics of Anatomy and the Problem of Death, Dissection, and Embodiment in 19th-Century America

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SBR-9520710 Doctoral Dissertation Research: "The Cultural Politics of Anatomy and the Problem of Death, Dissection, and Embodiment" This study integrates the formal history of physiology, anatomy, and medical education into the broader field of social and cultural history by illuminating the place of class, gender, and race in medical decision-making as well as in legislation concerning ethics in medicine. More particularly, it shows how physicians used anatomy to develop a vital identity and authority over both the living and the dead -- and how women, the poor, unorthodox healers, and radicals contested that authority and appropriated anatomy for their own purposes. Dissection was a potent method of producing knowledge but also a powerful metaphor. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to parts, and framed it with moral commentary. The dissected body was used to demonstrate that social categories were natural and conferred an epistemologically privileged status upon the profession. But dissection depended upon confiscation of the dead. As demand grew, black-markets in bodies flourished, and with them legal, social, and philosophical clashes over the nature and disposition of the dead. These issues were debated in pulpits and lecture halls, fought out in riots against medical schools, and decided in courts and legislatures, profoundly affecting death practices, and the legal and moral status of the body.